If the Russians Got into Voting Machines, I Fear for the Republic

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated." Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again."

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We are inching ever closer to the revelation that the actual vote totals were hacked—some very smart people are already there, by the way—and, once that happens, I don’t know where we go from there. The Republican Party already has shown it will tolerate all manner of jacking around with the franchise in pursuit of power and its benefits for the Republican donor class. But, simply, I don’t know if either party truly has the sand to face up to the possibility that a president* was installed under those circumstances.

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Talk about a story nobody wants to hear. Imagine if the margin of victory in, say, Wisconsin, was a result of votes “cast” in some cubicle farm in Minsk.

There is no evidence that any of the registration rolls were altered in any fashion, according to U.S. officials. In a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 79 percent of the respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned that the country's voting system might be vulnerable to computer hackers. In January 2017, just weeks before leaving his post, Johnson declared the nation's electoral systems part of the nation's federally protected "critical infrastructure," a designation that applies to entities like the power grid that could be attacked. It made protecting the electoral systems an official duty of DHS.

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That is a very carefully parsed statement. Not to be completely cynical, but “there is no evidence” can mean just that, or it can mean that we haven’t found any, or it can mean in the worst case that we’re afraid to look for it. In any case, it remains idiotic that we leave national elections in the hands of 50 individual state governments, with 50 individual secretaries of state, many of whom are undermanned, underfunded, and using equipment that is ridiculously outdated. That's to say nothing of the ones—Hi, Kris Kobach! What’s up, Ken Blackwell?—who are party hacks with their own agendas.

Jeh Johnson has been right all along. The electoral systems should be treated like the power grids and communications systems. The states are too riven with internal mischief and budget problems to handle a problem of this magnitude.

Many of the states complained the federal government did not provide specific threat details, saying that information was classified and state officials did not have proper clearances. Manfra told us those clearances are now being processed. Other states that NBC contacted said they were still waiting for cybersecurity help from the federal government. Manfra said there was no waiting list and that DHS will get to everyone. Some state officials had opposed Johnson's designation of electoral systems as critical infrastructure, viewing it a federal intrusion. Johnson said that any state officials who don't believe the federal government should be providing help are being "naïve" and "irresponsible to the people that [they're] supposed to serve."

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All it will take is incontrovertible proof that one precinct in one ward in one state was manipulated to crash forever what’s left of the faith we have that our elections are on the up and up. Given the damage being done at the moment to our institutions by the beneficiary of the Russia ratfcking that we know about, I’m not sure that the republic could sustain that kind of a blow. Neither, I suspect, are many of the parties responsible for investigating the possibility. The concept is terrifying, and rightly so.

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On Wednesday, former president George W. Bush told an audience in Abu Dhabi that he believes the 2016 presidential election was ratfcked by the Volga Bagmen. From USA Today:

Bush did not directly name Trump in the comments at a talk in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. He appeared there as part of a conference by the Milken Institute, a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif. "Whether (Russia) affected the outcome is another question," Bush said. "It’s problematic that a foreign nation is involved in our election system. Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results.”

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Yes, I get the irony in that last sentence. But I’m more intrigued by an earlier remark in which the former president says that whether Russia monkeyed with the outcome is “problematic.” He’s not sure, either. In 2000, when the illegitimate involvement of the United States Supreme Court installed Bush, who’d benefitted from a number of low-level scams in Florida, before and after the election, by and large, the country came around to pretending that hadn’t happened at all. I didn’t like how easy it was to forget what happened, and I dread the possibility that something worse happened last November, and I also dread the possibility that, if it is proven to be true, we’ll simply wave it off in time the way we waved off Bush v. Gore. If we do, we’re dead as a self-governing republic. Simple as that.

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